Arrow: Five Things We Know

In two weeks, some fans will be lucky enough to be the first to see an extended preview of CW’s Arrow at San Diego Comic-Con International. In the meantime, the anticipated DC Comics adaptation that seemed to come out of nowhere,  has been picked up for a 13-episode first season and has already put out a few pieces of footage, including one recent trailer that really started to turn some heads.What do we actually know about the series so far? Well, our friends at the Why I Love Comics podcast talked to writer and executive producer Marc Guggenheim in an episode that ran early today, and he confirmed a lot of the speculation that’s been surrounding the show and dangled one or two new pieces of information as well.It’s very inspired by Andy Diggle and Jock’s Green Arrow: Year One Guggenheim told Why I Love Comics that the influence of the miniseries had been huge–he called it a “proof of concept,” showing that a storytelling device they wanted to use within the show could work, and he said that the more realistic approach to how he came to develop Green Arrow’s “look” made a lot of sense to them and fit well with what they were trying to accomplish on Arrow. Oliver’s bodyguard on the series, in fact, is named after Diggle.The writer also tipped his hat a little bit to Mike Grell’s run on the title, which he called “seminal.” He suggested that, when the creators behind Arrow first decided that Star City was going to be renamed, they briefly entertained the idea of setting the series in Seattle, like Grell had, but that they opted for the creative opportunities that setting your story in a fictional city brings with it.It’s NOT Smallville“This is a brand-new take,” Guggenheim said simply when asked whether the show had any connection to Smallville, the CW’s last big DC superhero project, in which Green Arrow was a major player.He said that while the fan-favorite series was “an incredible vision of Superman and a lot of other DC characters, including Green Arrow,” the version fans will see in October necessarily comes from a different point of view and changes the tone to reflect that it’s Green Arrow, not Superman, who’s the heart of the show and those characters are after all very different people even if they usually are portrayed as living in a shared universe.